So I got eaten alive on the 4th, and I swear my spots are getting worse, not better! Perhaps it was poison ivy? ... from my friends patio? *confused*

I've been contemplating a few major-ish purchases lately. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to either share recent experiences with these (or similar) purchases or point me to resources that would help me make a good decision on buying these things.

1) Indoor cardio equipment. Right now my current idea is to get a trainer for my bicycle. Given that my apartment lacks much storage space, this seems to me a much better idea than an whole exercise bike. Of course, recumbent bikes = more comfortable than my bike, so there's still some appeal to an exercise bike.

2) Audio equipment. I have a decent flat screen TV, but no separate audio system for it. I also don't own a CD player or a radio. It seems like I could improve my TV/movie audio quality while also giving myself the ability to listen to music or the radio on something other than my computer.

3) Computer. I covet a new computer to game with. I've been a laptop person for about 7 years now but given that the primary reason I want a new computer is for gaming, a desktop is probably in order. I've considered trying to assemble a computer myself (which I did once before, a decade ago) but could also just buy something off the shelf.

4) More art for my walls! I have at least one spot where I'd really like to have some art to put up. Where does one find art from artists? (If you know of places in DC in particular, obviously that'd be useful.)

Thoughts? Recommendations?

If only desks were made for leg movement, this device might have been just what the doctor ordered. But alas.

Perhaps I should invest in DDR or something...

FT. Worth Gay Bar Raid: Gay Panic Defense

I just don't even know where to start.

From the Washington Post's main story:

Martin Griffith, a civilian employee at the Pentagon, also was inside the train that was struck. Afterward, he said, "I looked out the window. I looked up. I could see the wreckage hanging over the door. There was a woman there, too, trying to hang on."

He hit the emergency release and opened the door out onto the track. "That's when I realized people had been ejected out. They were lying on the ground next to the car," Griffith said.

He said he helped one woman who had fallen near the electrified third rail, collecting other passenger's T-shirts to stanch her bleeding.

After the power to the live rail was turned off and rescuers reached her, Griffith said, he found a teenage girl. He said it wasn't clear whether she had been ejected from the train that hit his or had climbed out on her own. Her legs looked broken, Griffith said, and he sat with her while firefighters used the jaws of life to open the doors on a nearby train so she could be taken to an ambulance.

"She said, 'Tell my boyfriend . . .' " Griffith said, and then he cut her off. "You tell him yourself. You're breathing. You can see me. You don't need to give me any last messages."

He then used her cellphone to call her mother. Ernice Beasly picked up: The injured girl was her daughter Lanice, 14. Later, she said that her daughter was at the hospital, unconscious and badly cut but alive. She said of Griffith: "Thank the Lord for him."

Griffith then walked to the Fort Totten Station and took the Metro home to Northern Virginia, still wearing the black pants and white dress shirt he'd had on at the crash scene.

"People were looking at me strange," he said. "I had blood all over me, none of it my own."

So glad I'm not in town this week, for all sorts of reasons.

Also, thank God(s)/luck/fate/etc. that the trains were traveling toward downtown. If they'd been coming from downtown at 5pm, I'm guessing the death toll would have been at least twice as high.

Just in case there are people who haven't heard from me in other electronic venues and/or aren't aware that I'm out of town this week, I am alive and well and was several states away from today's awful Metro crash. Best I know (at the moment), everyone I know in the DC area is also OK.

Fallen Princesses: Disney princesses facing some hard realities

Finally someone realized that it's time to start bulldozing the empty parts of cities and returning them to nature.

Chipotle goes on a tour of Polyface Farm - oh, Joel Salatin, you're adorable. RESPECT THE PIGNESS OF THE PIG.

With This Burger, I Thee Wed

The article talks about how "down home" is the hot new trend in weddings. Weddings that are, of course, profesionally styled and catered at a high price. The trick, of course, is to affect a "thrifty" sort of wedding appropriate to these recessionary times while still spending between one and four times the median US annual salary on the event.

A fun fact I learned from this article - apparently LA weddings of any worth have not only a wedding and reception, but also a substantial afterparty. I guess that's one way to solve the "how do I make sure I spend time with everyone I've invited to the wedding?" problem - have two receptions!

Twilight: The Broodening

Fantastic. But maybe I only think so because I got 5 hours of sleep.

If a pandemic doesn't kill many people, do we still call it a pandemic?

I'd been wondering about this since swine flu was in the news. The WHO has kept the pandemic alert level at 5, despite the fact that the virus has sustained community transmission on at least two continents. (Yes, the swine flu is still infecting people both here and in Europe.) That's stage 6, by the book, but they haven't declared it.

Effectively, they don't want to cry wolf. We have sustained community transmission of hundreds of diseases around the world - HIV, all the other sexually transmitted diseases, the common cold, etc, etc. With the exception of HIV, we don't talk about them as pandemics.

Basically, people have come to the realization that just "how much/how fast does it spread" is not adequate on its own; "how many people does it kill" also needs to be considered. Seems obvious, but apparently a not-particularly-lethal new flu strain wasn't something the WHO was prepared for. A lesson learned, I guess.

Pentagon Plans New Arm to Wage Wars in Cyberspace

I mean, Neuromancer references aside, I really want to see the propaganda posters for this. Something like, "Loose lips sink ships!" only about antivirus software and email safety. Maybe "Chinks in our armor? Protect your computer, protect America!" (Like my word choice, there? <3 propaganda.)

Here's a war propaganda poster, just for kicks. (It's the AHS Centaur, an Australian hospital ship that was sunk by the Japanese in WWII and subsequently used to rally support for the war effort.)

Hugging is the new black

I don't get it.

Say the name of an organization or company has changed. What is the proper way to cite something created by that organization under its previous name? I'm thinking of the Government Accountability Office (FKA the General Accounting Office) in particular. I'm leaning towards ignoring the name change and utilizing the name of the organization as it existed at the time of the release.

Does anyone else think that North Korea is a perfect test case for the limits of national sovereignty? I mean, it's a military dictatorship led by a personality cult whose populace is dirt poor. It's surrounded on all sides by developed nations with a fairly high level of democratization. And now (ok, ok, for the past 10 years) it's menacing its neighbors with nuclear weapons.

Too bad they don't have oil, eh?

When scientists hide a major find so that no one else can study it for a long period of time, and then go public with a massive publicity effort including a TV show and book tie-in and claim to have discovered "the missing link," well, it just screams HOAX HOAX HOAX.

So here's hoping it's not a hoax and all this "missing link" speculation doesn't just give creationists ammunition.